Recreating First Contact

Joshua A. Bell is Curator of Globalization in the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with archival and museum based research, he has worked with communities of the Purari Delta, Papua New Guinea, on various projects regarding the history of their engagements with resource extraction. As part of this work he has, and is, carrying out projects on the visual and material histories in Papua and their legacies.Alison K. Brown is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen. She has undertaken fieldwork and museum-based research in western and subarctic Canada and northern Scotland on projects that address the ways in which artefacts and photographs can be used to think about colonialism and its legacies. She is co-author of Sinaakssiiksi aohtsimaahpihkookiyaawa/Pictures Bring us Messages: Photographs and Histories from the Kainai Nation (2006) with Laura Peers and members of the Kainai Nation, and is currently working on a book that addresses the relationships between First Nations and British museums.Robert J. Gordon is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of the Free State in South Africa and the University of Vermont. His area focus is on southern Africa and Papua New Guinea. His eclectic interests range from violence, law, and state making/breaking to the media and dogs. Among his books are Law and Order in the New Guinea Highlands (1985) with Mervyn Meggitt, The Bushman Myth (1992), Tarzan was an Eco-Tourist (2006) co-edited with Luis Vivanco, and most recently, Going Abroad: Travelling like an Anthropologist (2010).